Windows 7 - Microsoft minus the martyrdom Such has been Microsoft's focus on consumers when launching and advertising Windows 7, you'd be forgiven for thinking business users didn't even exist. Yet, in early 2010, the wave of Windows 7 rollout will begin inside Microsoft-centric IT shops. A study of 184 customers considered mid- and large-sized customers by desktop …
How about the hatred of Vista from people who DID use it?? I have had to roll back more than a few Vista installations to XP for customers (some angry) who either found the new Vista interface unusable and confusing or the performance of Vista far below tolerable. We ran into several issues which limited productivity or prevented users from doing work entirely, including stupid bugs, random crashes due to driver problems, slow performance over VPNs, poor performance over internal networks, and so on.
Windows 7 is no more a service pack to Vista than it is a service pack to Windows 98, or XP was a service pack to 2000. Internals aside, as are detailed in great nauseum by Russinovich and crew, it is more stable, performs better, and more compatible than Windows Vista.
I have run Windows 7 in various stages, and have been pleased with what I have seen. I abhor the Vista interface so I have not implemented it on the metal of any of my own machines, but instead run it virtualized in VirtualBox and VirtualPC. The results have been very pleasing. And for the experience with 7 on metal, compatibility with software and hardware has been more than acceptable. There may be issues with some old or obscure components, but IMNSHO these types of things should not be in use except in extreme cases -- you know, when you center and entire enterprise around a whiz-bang gadget from a company which went out of business in a couple of years. (Of course, ignoring operating system compatibility, if that gadget dies, what then??)
Paris, whiz-bang gadget.
"Windows Vista was... [a] redesign the mother ship from the ground up"
Except that of course it wasn't really was it? More like knocking down a few internal walls, (including the odd supporting one, whilst forgetting to stick an RSJ in) and then buying a cheap kitchen that looked good but where half the drawers didn't work properly and the sink leaked.
(c) Bad analogies are us 2009.
...over XP.
If you have vista, and qualify for one of the cheap upgrade options to 7, it might be worth it, but only if you're certain all of your apps are 7 compliant.
If you have XP, and a very recent machine (likely because you downgraded from Vista), with 2GB of RAM or more and a dual core, then going to 7 is worth it, though you'll likely have a lot of software to buy. If you have an older machine, wait until you get a new one.
There's still issues:
- control panels are an inconsitant nightmare, worse even than vista, but simply ignore that and launch the panels direct from the start menu and you'll never notice.
- Backup is still broken, but now worse as the image backups are also automatic. File recovery works, but not system recovery, unless the images are burned to DVD, but that's not an option unless you do them manually on your own. Images to disk or network locations are STILL broken (restore media can't find them even if you browse it to the right folder manually).
- lots of default settings are not the prefered settings
- Search still sux.
- changes to start menu basically force you to use search instead of browsing for an app as you're used to
- home folders are still screwed (why can't I move the WHOLE home directory, instead I have to move 15 seperate folders which takes 6 clicks each and i have to browse each time for the new location! OMFG!)
That said it is more stable, its definetly faster, it certainly looks better, the taskbar is an improvement (if marginal), networking is much improved, reinstalls are quick and painless (reinstalling XP now takes hours with so many patches and packs to install followed by dozens of apps and features included already in 7), media center is improved, and honestly, once you use it for a month or so it really is a nicer experience (it's no OS X, but it's clearly taking lessons from it).
Stop listening to the media, swap out your hard drive, install 7, and USE it, then you can bash it if you don't like it. Odds are you won't dislike it, other than typical "why did they move/change that" which you soon get over, and in some cases, realize that although it's not what you;re used to, it is better in many ways.
I actually like Vista - or at least I did after waiting for SP1 and sticking 4GB RAM in there. Windows 7 seems like an improvement, but has a few niggles - most recent of which is dropping Removable Storage Management in W7 and Server 2008 R2. I'm not terribly amused that Microsoft is trying its damnedest to kill off tape, and that any tape software other than enterprise level (possibly even that) is utter crap - Windows Backup was adequate for most people.
I wasn't impressed by some of the drivers shipped with Windows 7 (incomplete, buggy), but Vista was the same and quite possibly XP was too. Fixed with official manufacturer drivers.
I can't say I have any problems with my KVM (A Compaq rebadged Avocent VGA one). In fact, I'd say it was easier to get all the resolutions on my monitor sorted in Windows 7 than under Vista, which fights you somewhat if your monitor isn't PnP enabled. It's also lovely to finally be able to install a display driver on Vista/Windows 7 without rebooting!
Given that Microsoft's most recent response to the KVM issue was 17 hours ago, I don't think whinging about their present 'lack of response' is acceptable. Complain if they go quiet for a month!
Frankly I've had KVM issues with plenty of OSses, especially the cheaper KVMs. The ways in which OSses cope with duff KVMs can differ, depending on the robustness of their keyboard/mouse code. I wouldn't say Windows was worst here, either.
until Windows 7 came along.
It's the monitor switching which Windows 7 can't cope with. It refuses to cooperate with a KVM switch that doesn't continuously broadcast EDID info.
"Complain if they go quiet for a month!"
That's pretty much what they did. That's why the contributors to the thread got irritated with them.
"they did redesign the mother ship from the ground up so that was excusable"
It is absolutely damn well NOT excusable. If Microsoft want the whole bloody world to use their shitty products, they are obligated to make them work, not release an update that simply doesn't work anywhere near as well as it's predecessor.
Bloody Microsoft apologists.
Home folders can be moved entirely............ but only if you create a custom install image and set the mount point for it in an auto answer script. Apparently you can symlink the Users folder, but on a live system I don't think I'd fancy my chances with that one ;)
Quite why MS can't just give an "Advanced" option during installation, I will never know. I would dearly love to be able to say "Stick Hom... sorry Users on the D: drive please, thanks". I totally agree with you though, it shouldn't take 600+ clicks to just move your folders to a place outside your OS partition.
Re: Backup - you also forgot with Backup, if you want to backup to a NAS or network server you can only backup to a machine running Windows 7!!!!! *arrrrgh* So it's pointless.
That said, Windows 7 is OK, but it does have lots of inconsistencies and more than a few rough edges (Control Panel especially, fourth version of it seems like MS can't decide how it should work, hint - leave it as applets that open in a new window and have done with it!).
@AC Still problems with Windows 7: re the taskbar/superbar thing, travesty/farce. I see you've struggled much like I did at first. You have likely tried to add shortcut icons and pin them; which is wrong! You need to pin the RUNNING program, otherwise it will reappear all over. No, I don't know why it is that retarded - but it is. So if you pin the running programs you can then drag them up and down and the position will be remembered with any new apps being thrown at the end. Hope that helps you a bit - it really, REALLY annoyed the hell out of me!
Is it just me, or does anyone else prefer Vista to W7? I hated Vista, I hated XP too. My real preference was Win 2000 Pro. The only stable, usable Windows OS IMHO.
I could at least make Vista work slightly like XP/W2K, but with W7 there's no chance what so ever. I kept Vista because it was on my new laptop (2 years old now) and also I needed it for my work. I repair PCs (no, not Windows). In over 10 years of fixing PCs, I've fixed 2 Apples. One had a dead battery and the other had a failed install of Ms Office for Mac. Admittedly, probably 90% of the Windows PCs I fix are virus/malware related problems, but there's still regular amusement when people complain their 6month old laptop is broken and after asking what OS is on it, I can tell them "no, it's just the OS has screwed up" and then finally returning their machine and telling them "I'll see you in another 6 months".
My Vista laptop now tripleboots Ubuntu Karmic (not impressed at all), Win7 RC and er.., something else! Ahem, I'm now about to buy a Mac in January. I've tried several different distros of Linux/BSD/Others. They all have their problems, mostly printers or software ie, I can't find an OS that supports my printer AND has the best package manager. Having to install individual apps to form OpenOffice is no use, software development is overly complicated or is missing major components which I have to manually search for & install. Or in the case of Karmic, Flash/Firefox is unstable along with 1 or 2 other problems.
I'm no "fanboi" of Apple, but I understand their control over the hardware makes them a bit more stable (mostly). My preference would be RISC OS, but until it's truly updated to the 21st century, it's not my main OS (I'm keeping an eye on you Jeff!!). I'm still running Win7 RC so I can learn to fix the influx of broken Windows PCs after Xmas. Either way, Microsoft products will never be used again for my own personal use.
I diddnt like XP at first & make it look like 2000 (I prefer the simplicity of W2000 Pro anyway) & Vista is dire. Microsoft seem to consider its target users are 5 years old & never seen a computer before or at least it certainly looks like it to me.
I wish there was a simple 'fix this crap' / 'Im over 40' / 'grumpy old man' button that got rid of those annoying balloon prompts and suppressed all the other rubbish in one go, a sort of universal Tweak UI, that makes any Windows OS look & work like your own PC for then few hours your fixing it before changing it all back to how it was before - ie messed up!
I also find that 95% of my 'repairs' are fixing malware & viruses, the others are mainly going back to XP from Vista or the power supply has croaked & died or burst into flames...
Windows 7 to be honest Im unsure, I did find one or two things during the beta & managed to crash Explorer after about 30 seconds on a brand new Dell. I just find the UI annoying and ribbon menus - yuk, please no!
Microsoft should have focussed on XP holdouts making it as easy as possible to make the change at a reasonable price point. To me, Windows 7 is a service pack for Vista & its too expensive.
I find my Mac Pro does a fine job and Ive never crashed it once, I run windows XP under VMWare which works for what I need & I doubt very much if ill ever buy a PC again.
The irritating crap you get by the bucket full with a PC, isnt installed on a Mac & I hope it never is.
Quite apart from the fact I've got multiple versions of the betas here and could run the RC until March/April, but removed it and went back to XP yonks ago - or could run any of several versions of the RTM using, say, Chew-WGA or RemoveWAT (which I have tested) - but here I am, still on XP:
I don't actually want to run any OS in 'pirate mode'. I want one that is legitimately mine. But I will _not_ buy (or even take as a freebie!) any 'Home' version, because almost the first thing I do on installing Windows these days is go through Group Policy and turn all that shite off, and I am not going to buy a copy that is crippled so GP won't work - and I sure as hell ain't going to pay £100 extra - or thereabouts - just to be able to run it!
For fscks sake - glitches and performance.......
Taking the glitches first - who'd bet the future of their enterprise that they wont encounter the glitches on Vista with their apps....... When you have a platform on which they currently work, keeping up with the Joneses for no good reason simply fails to make sense. Get real....
Performance- so in order to buy Ballmer a new banana businesses have to either accept shitty performance or spend more money, in a recession on a program of hardware upgrades.
Further in order to support this little lot, your boss ends up spending a boatload on training because the beast of Redmond redesigned everything largely to drive training revenues - Come on, get a fscking grip, in blighty they're still trying to outsource anything that moves in support departments, they're going ot pay those training costs ? I don't think so........
Now we have the Windows 7 corporate poster boys being wheeled out and the best they can say is that the product is less shitty than Vista.
In corporate terms, anyone care to mention what VIsta offered over XP/2000 etc....
Massive fail.
I bought a Medion quad core Pc a year ago. It has one major big thing going for it UAC. I have 2 boys, 10 & 15, they wouild install everything. UAC stops them cold, I retain control, they dont know my master password.
Yes Vista can be a pain but I dont know if I want to upgrade to 7, this is an OEM setup and I wouldnt mind a proper copy like I had XP on my old pc. Anyone done the upgrade this way, any problems?
I have 2x1Tb HDD fitted plenty of space to play.
You want to be a telco in the uk then you have to give big brother access!
Windows 7 (6.1) is Vista (6.0) service pack 3
W2K was 5.0
XP was 5.1
XP 64 bit and W2K3 was 5.2
W2K8 is also 6.0, and W2K8 R2 is 6.1
So if 2008 is 6.0 and also 6.1 (at R2) then that means that Vista (6.0) and W7 (6.1) are probably just as close, in other words Vista, W2K8 and W7 are the same codebase.
Nice recovery, Microsoft apologists (not El Reg, the IT people they are quoting). "Vista wasn't really crap, it was just in the users heads." No it was not. Vista was and is CRAP! I've SEEN it running, it's slow as hell, and I hit bugs and UI inconsistencies (not "oh the border looks different" but actual ones..) within minutes of using it, not doing anything exotic but just using the Windows Explorer. Our University deployed it (some, it's too bloated for most systems) and it is slow as balls on them too. And no, the solution to this is not to just say anything less than a quad core with 3GB is "underpowered", as many Vista apologists did.. it's to use something that's not so bloated. Needing GBs of RAM and multiple cores to run *the OS* is inexcusable. No comment on usability and such.
I give Microsoft the credit they are due for realizing this was a huge problem and worrying over performance for Windows 7 -- it's not as fast as Ubuntu but they got the performance WAY up. I am Microsoft free but I don't want to jump out the window when I see Win7 as I do with Vista.
"No it was not. Vista was and is CRAP! I've SEEN it running, it's slow as hell, and I hit bugs and UI inconsistencies (not "oh the border looks different" but actual ones..) within minutes of using it, not doing anything exotic but just using the Windows Explorer."
I call BS. I have over a dozen Vista business systems running, only 2 have 2GB of RAM, the rest have 1GB. They run just fine, and these computers cost $500 on down to $400, depending on when they were bought, and they run Intel graphics.
Aero runs just fine. The systems are stable, they haven't given me a bit of trouble, and while I will happily buy Win 7 systems in the future I have absoutely no desire to upgrade the Vista systems to Win 7.
Vista is not slow, it's not buggy, it's rock solid. Win 7 has some speed optimizations and memory reductions (mostly for video) but I upgraded a Vista machine with Win 7 (test bed) and while it's fun and a nice improvement, it's not enought to prompt me to spend my pitiful budget upgrading Vista machines.
The interviewees are right. Users bitched without ever trying Vista. The Mojave experiment proved that early on.
They bloody well did NOT redesign anything from the ground up. They took server2008 and slapped a shiny interface on it. A redesign would not have been an excuse in the first place, but there was actually NO FRIGGIN redesign involved here. They just introduced bugs in a pre-existent rather good codebase.
why is it that so many people can claim ubuntu and the likes are faster than windows 7 or even XP? I simply do not believe that. I have a few old laptops lying about, and I sometimes play around with Linux distros (cos it's free and interesting to experiment with) but I really do not think that linux is faster or feels faster than windows 7/XP on the same system. I can't comment on Vista, I never tried it. As a student i get free licenses for a lot of windows OSs (MSDNAA) so I get the chance to play with them all, and windows always runs better than Ubuntu 9.10 for example. My latest install was Ubuntu 9.10 on a Dell 5100 with a measly 512MB RAM, and it ran slow - and the CPU fan would turn on all the time even when it was just running idly after a boot. It was really stressing the system out so I installed Windows 7 and it worked far better and far quicker. Win XP would have been ever quicker I'd imagine.
so why is it that linux people always say it is faster and light on resources? It just is not true, i've never experienced it to be faster at all... Ubuntu 9.10 takes forever to start firefox or openoffice, and the entire interface seems to be jerky and slow.
just my opinion, but i'd bet many people reading this will agree. the linux fans may well be more vocal though!
I now run Ubuntu on my Macbook Pro and it "feels" faster and more nippy than the XP or OSX that I had before. It just feels more responsive.
With 4Gb memory I can quite happily run both XP and CentOS in VirtualBox VMs at the same time and it still feels pretty good. Don't have any figures, just a gut feeling.
[BTW I don't have an axe to grind against any particular OS, it's just a tools don't ya know?]
...that you do indeed test distros! Me too. In fact, it seems I never learn, because after I say "never again!", it seems a year on and I download a few more and try again. Half the time I don't even get the install completed, because some bug (usually not even a bug, just a stupid error or omission) has occurred that is so unacceptable I just turn the machine off, then boot something with a partition manager on and format the drive. I hate Microsoft but Windows always performs vastly better than whichever major distro I try. I _so_ want one to be good enough to permanently replace Windows with; and I detest people who claim that freeware is crap, but I'm forced to conclude that, with Operating Systems, at least, you _do_ get, more-or-less, what you pay for. And that Linux desktop advocates are basically so tight that they overlook _anything_ that could contradict their belief in the free OS. Private Fraser would run Linux. With some Heath Robinson contraption for stealing the electricity to power it (maybe an anode and a cathode inserted into a grave and tapping a difference in charge in the putrefaction process?).
There is a good reason why the "Linux fanbois" say that - because it is pretty much true!
Allow me to explain, there are rather a lot of differences between Linux and Windows:
I have deleted the long diatribe that I started to write. Bugger that. Search for "unetbootin". Grab a >1Gb USB stick and try out a few distros without touching your installed OS.
If you end up installing Ubuntu then you have my sympathy ...
(Ubuntu - an African word meaning Gentoo is too hard for me)
I'm a software professional, (and an old command-line dinosaur from Unix System V days at that) so 90% of what I do with a computer 10-12 hours a day absolutely does not require bit-mapped graphics. Point-wait-click-wait interfaces generally don't help me, so for me Linux makes much better use of the same hardware resources than any MS O/S including DOS.
Why should I waste most of my CPU and RAM constantly re-drawing the pixels for icons whose usage I need to hover-over to figure out?
For the "normal folks" who do not think of computing as a verb, (much less a profession) and need a GUI of some sort for everything they do, then you've got X-Windows (Linux, Mac) vs. Win32. Frankly, although much less flexible, I've actually come to find the MS GUI's more responsive, typically easier to use, and less flaky. Maybe I've just drunk the kool-aid.
If MS had left the XP interface or made it possible to go back to the basic Win 2000 look, I do not think there would have been as much resistance to the product despite the bugs. People hate change and the longer time between changes makes it worse. If you can change things but make it something familiar there is a lot less shouting from the masses.
Me too. Win2K seemed like the best thing MS ever did.
Simple, easy to figure out, just all around cleaner.
That was when I was won over by MS.
They've been losing me ever since.
It's like MS marketing discovered Win2K was too good and forced a change of direction.
It felt to me like MS started tinkering with XP and delivered the full abortion with Vista.
I suspect we'll never see a release like Win2K from MS ever again.
I agree completely with the assessment that Vista is good and that vocal detractors have either never tried it, or have some misguided pre-conceived notion as to what a new Microsoft OS should have been. Vista started out rough but every OS Microsoft has ever release has had the same problems. I remember back when Windows XP was released. You could install a clean copy and within minutes you would start to run into strange problems with the task bar. I fielded a lot of complaints from my friends and family over that one. That and drivers were only available for the most current hardware on the market. If your machine was a year or two old you had a high likelihood of having to replace at least one piece of hardware. Since XP's release in 2001, most people have long forgotten the teething trouble that plagued its early adopters.
As far as I can tell, Vista's bad reputation was primarily the fault of the press / media. Almost everywhere I turn even today I constantly run into articles that claim Vista to be terrible or refer to it as Windows ME2. Yet all of my friends and family who use the OS, as well just about every IT professional I personally know, agree with the that the now matured Vista is actually quite good. I wish more media professionals would do first hand research rather than just quoting the opinions of other media professionals who also didn't bother doing any first hand research. You did a nice job here Gavin! It is refreshing to read an article that genuinely parrots my own experiences with Vista.
Yeah, or at least if the interface changes made more sense.
With the interface change from NT 3.5 to NT 4, I was thrilled.
There was still a lot of clicking as I'd expect from a gui, but for the most part things were easy and sort of intuitive. Win2k still good.
XP? what was with the Fisher Price kiddy theme?
Then Vista came along, moved/changed things & adds even more clicks.
What was the point to these changes?
BTW, whatever happened to the file system as a database?
Wouldn't it be nice to see something like this delivered?
I have Win XP 64 on my CAD workstation and on my Thinkpad w700. They continue to make me money by processing all my stuff in a brisk and stable manner.
The Thinkpad came with Vista Business 64. Using AutoCAD was like sitting on a chair with 3 legs. Crashes every 30 minutes. Put XP64 on & voila, stable useful computer.
I also trialled Windows 7 up to the RC but gave up because nothing made up for what they did to Explorer & File searching. Also, you couldn't open more than 16 files at the same time. I asked Steve Sinofsky if the logical next step was to replace the Calculator with an Abacus? (Think touch-screen and custom colours!)
He didn't reply.
Fuck him. He also mentioned he was responsible for that fucking animated dog.
XP64 - Still the one
"Windows 7 is a service pack or a fix for Windows Vista," Blake said. "But they branded it as a new product because if they said SP 3 - even if it has every single fix - it would still have the mental attachment to that old operating system. By releasing it, that's given every enterprise the opportunity in the world to adopt some technologies they really wanted to."
More like they didn't release it as Vista SP3 because they wouldn't get any more revenue from it!
Great idea though, release a crap product, ask the users to help you fix it, apply their fixes, release it again with a different name and get them to cough up again for it! :)
The wife ordered a new laptop that came with 7. It has enough UI changes to be confusing. Also the horsepower of the machine it comes on and it does feel kinda slow. At the same time she had ordered a refurbished machine that is roughly half the CPU power and half the RAM with XP SP3 and it feels positively snappy (although the intended user, the teenager son states he wants Ubuntu on it....), with I had stopped learning new windows with XP and that will remain so. There is less of a learning curve going to GNU/Linux (most mainline distro's) from XP than to 7. Most of the machines we have are now running either Ubuntu or Puppy these dayss...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
